In this instructional video, Outlook expert Randy Dean demonstrates a collection of productivity‑enhancing right‑click options available in Microsoft Outlook. He walks through the standard actions (Reply, Reply All, Forward, Categorize, Quick Print) and explains why he avoids the Mark Unread and Follow Up features, preferring to convert emails into tasks or calendar items. Dean shows how to drag an email onto the Task, Calendar, or People icons to create a task, appointment, or contact that retains the email’s content and attachments. He then leverages Quick Steps to perform the same conversions with a single click. Additional right‑click features covered include Find Related (searching by sender or conversation), Ignore (automatically moving future related messages to Trash), Create Rule (custom notifications, sounds, pop‑ups, and advanced criteria for automated actions such as moving, deleting, forwarding, or marking messages), and Block Sender. Throughout, Dean emphasizes practical workflow improvements, encourages viewers to experiment with these tools, and offers further resources via linked videos, PDFs, and his website.
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Alright, good evening everyone. My name is Randy Dean, the Email Sanity Expert, and I wanted to share with you a quick Outlook tip, which is a list of all of my favorite options on what you can do with an email in Microsoft Outlook just by right-clicking on the email. Now once again, my name is Randy Dean, Email Sanity Expert, and I want to dive right in and share with you some of these options tonight. So let's dive in. Let's pop into my Outlook and notice here I've got the single little email in my inbox. I've got everything nice and clean tonight. And what I'm going to do is just come up to this email and do a right-click. And when I right-click on the email with my mouse, notice that'll give me several options which are pretty standard: Reply, Reply All, Forward. It also gives me the option to come down here if you're a category user in Microsoft Outlook to quickly jump into your categories list and categorize the email. And you can even quick print the email, which will send it to your default printer. Which is pretty cool. Now, two that I don't like, I don't like Mark Unread and I don't like Follow Up. And let me tell you why I don't like either of those. Basically, if you've ever been to one of my email classes, you know I would much rather that you turn that email into a task or a calendar item and then execute that task or calendar item at the appropriate time on the appropriate date and not mark them unread or follow up because then you're gonna have to read your emails over and over and over again, and that's a huge time waste. So these two I'm not a fan of. But I want to show you something else that's pretty cool. This is one of my absolute favorite things you can do with a right-click on an email. This time what I'm going to do is a right-click, hold the click, drag it down to Task and drop it. And look what this does. This allows you to either just turn it— turn— make a copy of the email, which is a task, and it will have the text of the message inside the task, or It'll allow you to bring over the attachment while you still keep the email in your inbox, or just completely change the email into a task with the attachment. So this is a way that you can bring over the attachments on your emails. And yes, take a look— right-click, hold, drag and drop to Calendar. That allows you to do the same thing for a calendar appointment. And notice, right-click, drag and drop to People. It'll also allow you to bring attachments to new contacts when you create them. And so this is a way that if you have a message that you want to turn into a task, a calendar item, or a contact, and it has an attachment on the message, you've got options to do that. Now I actually have another YouTube video which I'm going to link to in the comments section below this video, which gives you a much more detailed description on how to use that drag and drop capability in your Microsoft Outlook. So look in the comments section below for that. But speaking of this, let's go back to the right-click. I want to show you a little trick. If you have gone ahead and set up your Quick Steps in Outlook, which I have another YouTube video which I'll link to in the comments about how to use your Quick Steps. Watch this. I can just come over here and hit Convert to Task and boom, look at that. The email has now been converted into an actual task item in Outlook. Same thing. I can do the same thing with a Quick Step and convert to calendar. So I'm basically, I've set up my Quick Steps to make some of these things push button. And now I can access those Quick Steps just by doing a right-click on the email. All right. So let's also take a look at this. Once again, remember you can see more about those Quick Steps and how to set them up in the other YouTube video I'm commenting on below. Watch this. I'm going to go back to right-click. I want to just show you something really cool that somebody in one of my programs showed me the other day. Find Related. Take a look what this gives you the option to do. One, you can find all messages from that particular sender, or two, you can find all messages that have been part of this email conversation. And this might just be a super easy way, especially if you've been filing stuff into your folders, to just pull up the emails that are related to the conversation or from that particular person. That's really cool. All right, and now take a look at this. If you come down below, there's another new function in here that I think you'll find really cool called Ignore. Watch what this does. What that means is that this message in the conversation and all related future messages will automatically be moved to your trash folder. Let me tell you when that one's handy. You get copied on the message to your coworker Jack, who is celebrating his 10-year anniversary with the company. And now everybody on your department and in your floor decides to send their reply alls congratulating Jack. And now you're getting 55 emails today, all with the same little message on it. There you go. You can hit Ignore. They'll all go right into your trash can. That's beautiful. Alright, now let's come back to this. I want to show you one that's really cool, and I cover quite a bit in one of my classes. What if I just wanted to know this Randall F. Dean guy was sending me an email? Which is frankly a tad odd because I'm sending myself an email. Right-click, come down to Rules, hit Create Rule. And now watch this. If it's from me and only from me, I can have it set up so it does a pop-up on my screen. Or it plays a different sound. Now, this is Windows Notify, which is that little bubbling sound that you've been hearing for years and years. But you could go check your computer to see if there's any other little sound files, the little .wav sound files you could install, and thus change the sound of particular senders. That's pretty cool. But hold on, you don't just have to do this. Watch this. If you go to Advanced, you can do it by sender, you can do it by what's in the subject line, you can do it by whether the email is marked important, you can do it by whether there are certain words in the body that the address, the sender's address. And this one in particular, the sender's address, one of the things I like about that is that way you could set it up so that any email that comes from like one of your key client companies or your key vendors from those companies, you can basically get special notifiers anytime anyone from that company sends you something. So that's pretty cool. But wait, there's more. Go one level deeper. Look at this. It's not just setting up sounds or setting up popups. You can automatically move emails to specific folders. You can set it up so that when certain people email, they're email you, they're automatically deleted. That's pretty cool. And you can even set it up so that it'll have like specific messages marked important and/or forwarded on to people. Some really cool options in here. So I recommend you get in and play around with some of these tools because it might speed up some of the things that you've been doing. All right, now let's cancel out of here. A little bit more here to show you. We've already talked about several of the things, but I wanted to show you one last one down here that I'd like you to take a look at right here. Block Sender. That may be useful if you got that one particular person. I want you to be a little careful here. Make sure it's the same person with the same email that is trying to send to you, and then you can just go right there and set it up so that their emails just stop coming in. Wow, that's a lot of quick tips on how to use that right-click option on your Outlook emails. I would actually recommend you might want to watch this email— or this email, excuse me, easy for me to say— this video 2 or 3 times, because you're going to be able to pick up a few new tips each and every time. And start playing around and trying a few of these tips and see how it works. Now do me a favor too, if you've got something else that you're using, I would love to hear what it is. Leave a note in the comments below about some of the other capabilities that you might you might be using in conjunction with this. And, uh, let's go ahead and finish this thing up. I'm going to pop back in here. Uh, if you'd like to know a little bit more about me, like I said, my name is Randy Dean. You can go out to my website, randalldean.com, to find out information about some of my different speaking and training programs. I do all over the United States, Canada, and even occasionally Europe. I even have links to full-length 90-minute-plus webinar programs on replay that you could look into. And of course, if you like this video, if If you like this video, please go ahead and subscribe. And when you do subscribe, I'll make a little special notice for you here. Send me an email, randy@randalldean.com, put YouTube PDF in the subject line, and I will send you a baker's dozen of little productivity PDF tip sheets in electronic PDF form sent to you by automated email. Imagine that. And they will give you additional tips on time management, email management, Outlook usage, Gmail and Google usage, smartphone tablet usage, even how to run better meetings. And with that, thank you for your time. Hope you had fun today. Thanks.
